I suspect I may have the least coding experience of anyone here, which is not what I expected, I don’t think. This two hours of Python tutorials makes up the most significant encounter with code I’ve had basically ever. At my boyfriend’s encouragement (he’s a programmer) and out of boredom I once played with CodeAcademy’s Ruby tutorials, but I didn’t get very far and it wasn’t very meaningful so I remember litter other than the conditional construction which I just re-learned in Python. I found the tutorials for Python fairly easy, though I had my bouts of frustration, too. Still, they don’t seem very meaningful just yet, and I doubt that they will until I’ve completed more of them–indeed, I hope that they eventually do.

I think of the process of learning code more like the process of learning to read, I think. At first, you learn all of these letters, and then you learn the sometimes too-numerous different sounds that each letter can potentially make, and then you learn some rules to help you figure out that the t in “the,” “hat,” and “catch” are all different, but you by then you’re overwhelmed and frustrated and sick of reading stories filled with monosyllabic rhyming words when you know, on whatever level, that there’s Shakespeare out there to be read. That’s where I am. My boyfriend and his peers (and many of my classmates! Kudos!) are reading Shakespeare while I’m still trying to figure out why “bet” and “beet” are two different words. This is all to be expected, and I’m eager to learn–eager and maybe a little nervous!

The way I’ve been relating all of this to English as a discipline is a bit easier for me to talk about (English! I can do English!). I’m thinking about coding as a language that alters the way we think. Think about it. Imagine you’re a coder–well, I guess a project architect or what have you–and someone asks you to make an application for them. They want it to recognize the cadence in a person’s voice and tell you what region of what country of what planet she’s from. You have to take that task and break it down into all of these little mini-tasks that can somehow be converted into data in a database and a bunch of functions that (I’m guessing) look something like the if/elif/else conditionals I was just writing. You’re no longer recognizing someone’s regional accent. You’re now identifying frequencies and pitches of sound waves and putting that data through a series of processes to produce an output. The task changes. In my humanities-oriented mind, I’m tempted to say that it loses something–its soul or something like that.

Of course, there are conventions that we force/encourage young and inexperienced writers to follow, too. There’s MLA style guides and whatever our particular grammar/style pet peeves are that we transmit to our students, intentionally or not. So that’s what I’m wondering. If we’re writing code, whose values are being transmitted to us, shaping us as composers of code? And is there some sort of way that we can shape back, leave our “style” on computer coding as a whole, or even just our own? I have far too primitive an understanding of code to have an answer, but I’m intrigued by the question.

I’m excited to learn more Python and maybe be able to USE it to MAKE something soon, and even more excited to hear more from all of you!